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“If tyranny ever came to the United States . . . it would be the result of the impossible-to-satisfy desire to secure the country’s exceptional border… Just as the United States couldn’t have Jim-Crow apartheid and Bull-Conner police departments and still call its political system liberal and democratic, it can’t have a shadow class of over ten million disenfranchised residents, fulfilling some of the country’s most essential jobs, living in fear of an unaccountable immigration enforcement bureaucracy, and still be considered an open, free society.” — “Democrats Must Abandon Dangerous Security First Rhetoric,” Washington Post

“Reports from the borderlands read like pages from Blood Meridian, from a world completely devoid of morality, stripped of the ability (or the need) to justify violence as necessary to bring about progress.” — “American Extremism Has Always Flowed from the Border,” Boston Review

“As the officers gathered “night after night,” they drank beer and watched “playbacks” of their interrogation sessions. It was, said one of the men involved, a way of initiating new recruits into the cult of border brutalism.” — “The Border Patrol Has Been a Cult of Brutality Since 1924” The Intercept

"There existed, in the mid-1970s, a number of domestic constituencies in the United States pushing for more stringent border control, of the kind that a razor-sharp border fence might provide.” — “How the US Weaponized the Border Wall,” The Intercept

“Around this time, right-wing activists began calling for a “wall” to be built along the border. The biologist Garrett Hardin, a tenured professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was among the first to call for such a barrier. “We might build a wall, literally,” Hardin wrote in a 1977 essay titled “Population and Immigration: Compassion or Responsibility?” published in The Ecologist. Hardin was an early exponent of what today is called “race realism,” the idea that a world of limited resources and declining white birth rates calls for hardened borders.” — “The Vast, Stupid, Useless” (according to Borges) Wall,” Jacobin

“What follows is a chronology of both the physical fortification of the U.S.-Mexico boundary and the psychic investment in such a fortification -- the fantasy, chased by both Democrats and Republicans for more than half a century, that with enough funds, technology, cement, steel, razor ribbon, barbed wire, and personnel, the border could be sealed.” — “A Timeline of Border Fortification,” TomDispatch

"That wall might or might not be built. But even if it remains only in its phantasmagorical, budgetary stage, a perpetual negotiating chip between Congress and the White House, the promise of a two-thousand-mile-long, thirty-foot-high ribbon of concrete and steel running along the United States’ southern border serves its purpose. It’s America’s new myth, a monument to the final closing of the frontier. It is a symbol of a nation that used to believe that it had escaped history, or at least strode atop history, but now finds itself trapped by history, and of a people who used to think they were captains of the future, but now are prisoners of the past."— from the Introduction to The End of the Myth

PRAISE FOR THE END OF THE MYTH

“One of our most gifted writers and thinkers, Greg Grandin has given us a history of the United States like none other. It is a history written from our ever-shifting and expanding borders, a history of our quest to escape history, and a history of how that history has now caught up with us. The End of the Myth bubbles with ideas, insights, and challenges (and often with wry humor), offering essential perspective on our current condition.”—Steven Hahn, author of A Nation Under Our Feet

“A great book. Brilliant, erudite, and above all else fresh, The End of Myth offers a genuinely new, compelling, and historically informed framework for understanding the madness of this political moment.”—Chris Hayes, author of A Colony in a Nation

“Many historians have recounted the legend-encrusted saga of American expansionism. Written with insight, passion, and uncompromising moral clarity, The End of the Myth renders all prior interpretations obsolete. The Age of Trump needs history that is both bold and subversive. On both counts, Greg Grandin delivers.”—Andrew J. Bacevich, author of Twilight of the American Century

“‘If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists,’ Cecil Rhodes once said. The End of the Myth trenchantly relates how an American dream of expansion and growth managed to contain domestic disaffection, and reveals the perils of a shattered imperial fantasy. Describing the consequences of an exhausted imperialism, Grandin illuminates, like few have, our treacherous present. A tremendous book.”—Pankaj Mishra, author of Age of Anger

“What happens when expansion is no longer viable as a promise for the nation’s future and as a fix for its problems? Greg Grandin’s analysis of our current political moment is historical, erudite, provocative, and beautifully written.”—Mae Ngai, author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America

“A compelling examination of the American history of frontiers, by one of the most innovative and imaginative historians in any field. Troubling but inspiring, this is intellectual history for a broad readership; its sweep and force are stunning. Grandin brilliantly gives our current conditions of aggression, nostalgia, and racism deep historical grounding for the benefit of all who will listen.”—David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

“This book is an extraordinarily incisive look at the myths that Americans have used to evade our real situation and the responsibilities we might have to one another as members of a democracy. It is also a rich, illuminating, and unsettling retelling of American history as the story of these evasions and the harm they have done—and the countercurrents we might still hope to draw on to build a deeper and better democracy.”—Jedediah Purdy, author of After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene